Who Is Peter Hambro?

He is the guy that is looking at buying parts of the bank Parex, which is located in Riga Latvia.

Hambro is chairman of the third-largest Russian gold mining company, Petropavlovsk, and is a scion of a famous British banking dynasty.

The statement did not specify how much money had been offered for the assets, and Latvian government sources were remaining tight- lipped about any possible deal.

The Latvian state, which bailed out Parex, holds around three quarters of shares in the bank and is anxious to recoup as much cash as possible. Investment bank Nomura has been hired to draw up plans for Parex's possible break-up and sale.

Ministers are due to discuss Nomura's recommendations on March 9.

Part of Hambro's team is Mikhail Shelkov who was with Valdimir Putin when they met with the Venezuelan Oil and Energy Minister...

cached information below...

Mikhail Shelkov, deputy chairman of Peter Hambro Mining's board of directors (left), before Vladimir Putin's meeting with the Venezuelan Oil and Energy Minister.
Location:Russia, Moscow
Date of event:01.02.2010
Author: Alexsey Druginyn, STF
Source:RIA Novosti
Original:Digital
Incoming date:01.02.2010

As previously warned, Russia is making its move on the Baltics and is focused on Latvia because of its financial importance. And they are doing it through proxy.

Moreover, tied in with Hambro, is Russia's play on gold since Hambro owns the third largest gold mine in Russia.

Peter Hambro, chairman of Peter Hambro Mining (and former gold trader), was in attendance and highlighted the significance of the massive buying of call options in the June and December 2009 Comex gold contracts. Last week's Thunder Road News discussed Adrian Douglas' analysis of this situation and noted that his sources are telling him the buyers are the two banks closest to the U.S. government. Hambro believes that this option buying might reflect the closing out of carry trades.

Who were the two banks that were closest to the U.S. Government? Moreover, you have this on manipulation of the gold markets.

GATA's 2005 conference in Dawson City was attended by one of Russian President Vladamir Putin's advisers. Subsequently, Putin was photographed holding a gold bar and quoted as saying he supported the Russian central bank's plan to double its gold reserves.

John Embry, chief investment strategist of Sprott Asset Management in Toronto, described his 46-year "personal journey" in the investment world, for more than 30 years of which he has been closely associated with the gold market. He described how in other markets, good analysis could reach logical conclusions about the direction of market prices. In the late 1990s he observed how "the exact antithesis existed in the gold market." This opened his eyes to what was really happening.

Embry believes that the failure of so many people to acknowledge the manipulation of gold resulted from their being unable to believe that governments would conspire against their own citizens. What a touchingly naive notion!

Besides getting the GATA message over to a larger audience, the meeting was also a fund raiser. Additional funds will be used to further GATA's legal efforts to obtain more information on the manipulation in the gold market and bring it to a halt. Such actions might include:

-- Freedom-of-information lawsuits against the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury.

-- Legal action against the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

-- And action against the U.S. Mint, which is assigned to mint as many gold and silver coins as are demanded by the public but has violated this requirement in recent years.

So who is Peter Hambro and why the interest in the bank Parex? Could it be that it holds huge Russian assets that were bailed out by Latvia and is an easy buy since pressure is mounting on Latvia?

Parex was founded in 1992 and spent years as a high-flying bank with an ability to attract sizable deposits from rich Russians as well as local clients.

However the credit crunch brought it to the edge of collapse in 2007, which in turn dragged the Latvian state to the verge of bankruptcy when Parex was nationalized in 2008.

An emergency bail-out by the government and subsequent injections of cash have seen more than 1 billion dollars spent on propping up what was the largest home-grown financial institution in the Baltic states.

Latvia turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international lenders, including the European Union and World Bank, for a 7.5-billion-euro bail-out in the wake of the crisis at Parex.

Prominent local businessman Nils Melngailis was appointed to reshape Parex and has managed to restore some stability by renegotiating the repayment terms of a large syndicated loan and attracting the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development as an investor.

What a scam is being placed on the country of Latvia...